It’s been a long time since we talked about the astronaut dark fantasy roguelite shooter witch firewhich has been in the works since 2017. All that development time seems to be paying off later this year, as the developers have announced that witch fire will be coming to Steam Early Access in Q4 2022.

The reveal was part of the astronauts’ final Q&A session with fans, which also discussed the exact type of game. witch fire is, and some of the mechanics of the game. Regarding early access, the developers claim that unlike their previous games in Bullet Storm and The disappearance of Ethan Carterthe Early Access model “comes into its own” for witch fire. After seeing how much roguelite games like underworld Where dead cells have used early access to refine and expand their worldbuilding and lore alongside gameplay, astronauts are looking to borrow elements from those games’ development pathways to bring witch fire to bear fruit.

As for the date, the team believes that setting a specific month rather than a range is “useless”. “After countless delays to countless games, we don’t think it makes sense to name a day unless we’re 100% certain it’s doable. And we’re not 100% sure that’s achievable. So while this timeline seems reasonable to us, we don’t want to make a fool of ourselves and commit to a particular day and month.

And this roguelite gameplay? It wasn’t initially clear from previous reveals that the game would use these mechanics, but according to the developers, the term is fitting. witch fire. “From our perspective, the best reason we’ve found to call a game a roguelite is some level of forgiveness, usually in the form of the so-called persistence layer. In human parlance, that means you don’t lose not everything when you die.

“Our persistence layer is large enough that we would consider calling the game a dark fantasy RPG shooter instead of a dark fantasy roguelite shooter. But, at least for now, we’re totally on board with the latter. Roguelite it is. In other words, you will be punished with death, but not to the point of losing everything. You will always keep a few items for you to unlock new cool things in due course.

You can check out the rest of the dev updates (and the random Q&A session) from the link above. Currently, witch fire is in development for PC via Steam.